


Thoughts, Counting, et al.

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: M/M, MI6 Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 08:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13096122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: “No complaints, Christmas Elf Q!  You have until December 21st to complete your mission and bring your gift-wrapped (professionally, in your case, please) results to the Executive Wing break room.  We’ll be exchanging gifts at 2.”





	Thoughts, Counting, et al.

Honestly, he’s forgotten about signing up.  It was weeks ago, a lull between massive missions.  All of his charges had come home safe, and the giant baubles had just been hung in Covent Garden Market, and he’d thought—drunkenly, perhaps, because Eve had waylaid him in the pub after the drink he’d had to wind down from the day, the drink he’d had to celebrate a successful, death-free mission, and the drink he’d had because the first two had been so lovely—and he’d thought, “Sure, why not?”  He’s always liked giving gifts, and it’s not something he gets to indulge in often enough, being single and living alone with his cats.  Sure, why not?

It isn’t his fault he’d overlooked the email.  In Q’s defense, he hadn’t even seen it in the flood of emails detailing updated armoury requests as the mission in Cameroon had slowly crept its way from “fluffy excuse to send 004 to a relatively stable part of Africa to lie on a beach and observe a bit” to “Well, we may need an extraction sooner than later” before exploding into “Oh.  Oh, God.  They’re burning everything”.  It wasn’t until they’d managed to get 004 out through Nigeria—which had offered its own unique troubles—that Q had been able to take a day to slog through the backlog of thousands of emails and happened upon this one from Eve.

_ “Hello, Christmas Elf Q!  Your section of Santa’s list consists of Medic Pitt.  Medic Pitt has included the following message: _

‘If I get one more bloody box of novelty bandages I’m going to start using them to tape people’s mouths shut.  I mean it, Eve, don’t you dare assign me to someone whose call sign starts “00”.  Don’t.  I cannot bear it.’

_ “I told him this message was supposed to be about what he would like to receive, but he insisted.  I suppose it’s useful that he filled it out at all, unlike someone who is probably going to just get piles of tea like he does every year because he can’t be bothered. _

_ “No complaints, Christmas Elf Q!  You have until December 21st to complete your mission and bring your gift-wrapped (professionally, in your case, please) results to the Executive Wing break room.  We’ll be exchanging gifts at 2.” _

Which is exactly one week from now, as Eve has so thoughtfully reminded him when she’d come by to drop off the new updates to Double-oh Seven’s upcoming mission.  Reminded with a pointed flick of her eyes at his computer and a sympathetic, “Why does the world always go to shit at Christmas?” followed by drumming her nails on the edge of Q’s desk.  He’s a spy.  He can read between the lines.  

It isn’t as though Bond’s mission will require a great deal of concern or prep: pop out to Bahrain, manage not to get shot retrieving the Royal Princess who’s decided that being 194th in line to the throne is no reason to not flee to England’s decadent Western lifestyle.  She’d studied in Oxford; Q anticipates she will sleep with Bond at least twice before they return and Bond forgets she exists.

The point is, there’s plenty of time to find something for Medic Pitt.  Honestly, Q’s fond of the man.  They’d been hired at the same time, Kevin for a role higher than Q’s own lowly tech support and obviously meant for vastly different teams; Kevin had been genial and friendly—friendlier than the others in their little hiring class who’d called Q’s number quick and decided he wasn’t worth their time.  Kevin’s the only other one left from that group, now, and they’d traded sympathetic congratulations when the same tragedy had elevated them to leading their respective departments.  Kevin Pitt is good people, and Q has no idea what to give him.  

A mug, perhaps?  Simple, classic, reliable.  No one has ever been displeased at receiving a mug from the office draw, and if he looks hard enough Q’s sure he’ll be able to find something—he remembers distantly a website featuring plush disease microbes and that settles that—it may be stereotypical and obvious, but it’s no box of bandages with the word “wanker” written on.  Resolved at the easy enough solution, Q turns his attention back to the discreet little listening device he plans on sending out with Bond so that, for once, he might not be made as soon as his earpiece is spotted.

::

—the best laid schemes o’ spies and men….  Of course.  Of course a simple evac would be anything but simple for James Bond; of course 007 would find himself in inexplicable danger.  Of course he’d be—a wet, sucking rasp escapes Q’s throat, and he doesn’t realize he’s down, that he’s having a panic attack at the sudden sight of orange blooming enormous petals that lick at the nearby cars, at the sound that had swept through Q-Branch with devastating accuracy, the incredible hollow emptiness of a dea—that sucking sound again—a cut line.  Someone’s prying his fingers apart with just enough strength to be firm instead of gentle, and the remains of a mouse fall from it.  When Q can pull his chin from where it’s tucked against his chest in the panicked instinct to keep the hurt inside, it’s Medic Pitt carefully placing the bloodied shards of plastic back on the edge of Q’s desk from the crouch he’s pulled that emulates Q’s own.  Q’s fallen—more ways that one, and publicly enough that he’d be humiliated if his ears didn’t ring with the phantom sounds of crunching bone, for all he knows he couldn’t have possibly heard it over the scream of metal ripping.  Blown up.  The princess’s car had blown up.  With 007 inside.  He feels cold again, but when his fingers try to knot themselves into balls, it’s Medic Pitt’s steady hands that hold his left palm open until he can get at the largest of pieces, can cover the flat of it with a thick gauze pad.

“Alright then, there?”  The words are quiet, a name Q’s not said aloud buried within them, and it’s grounding.  He looks up at Medic Pitt’s face.

“I’m.  I don’t.”  He doesn’t finish; there aren’t thoughts to complete the statements.  Medic Pitt understands anyway.

He’s still in Medic Pitt’s office when, only a little more than three hours later, there’s a medical evac into the wing and Medic Pitt rushes out, disappearing into the flurry of white coats and shouting.  In his palm, Q’s new stitches march soldiers, puckered through the puffed and ruddy valley cut deep across his hand; Q traces a thumb over the taut black lines—they feel like waxed cord, thick and stiff and weird—until the lidocaine wears off and he can feel the tingling soreness of the skin stretched and pierced around them.  Fourteen stitches.  Fourteen stitches and it’s his heart that aches.

When Medic Pitt returns, he looks exhausted.  Even so—“Oh,” Kevin murmurs, fingertips brushing the back of the chair he was about to collapse into in favor of fishing something out of his cupboard; the weighted blanket hits the back of Q’s shoulders and almost immediately he feels less burdened.  Medic Pitt’s eyes crinkle in the corners.  “Medical mystery: sometimes we just need to feel hugged.”  It works.  For the first time in hours, Q can feel his shoulders unknotting, his fist loosening into a languid curl.  He’s calmer, softer somehow, as his hand is lifted from his lap, the stitches covered over with a thick cotton pad, a bandage wrapped firmly around until it resembles so much an oven mitt instead of his familiar hand.  Q scowles.

Someone brings them tea; someone takes the blanket and replaces it with a lighter, felt thing when Q begins to feel more human.  No one bothers trying to tell him to leave, and when he drifts like a magnet drawn into Bond’s room, they’re both surprised to see the other there.

“You look terrible.”  Bond’s voice is dry, crackled paper; healing is thirsty work.  

Q freezes, parched.  “You look worse.”  A beat.

“I do,” Bond concedes.

“The princess?” because Q is capable of pretending at professionalism when Bond wasn’t there to see him lose all semblance of it.

“Fine.  A bit shaken—I think she broke her arm.”

“And yours,” Q adds.  Bond concedes again with a graceful bow of his head.  It’s nearly the only part of him that can still move for the gauze and padding.

“Q.” 

It comes over him in a rush: someone’s told.  Q’s a spy; he can read between the lines.  He turns his chin because it’s easier being let down gently when you can’t see their pity.  “I figured I’d have a day or so before someone said,” Q tells him, trying for blithe and landing afield in vaguely funereal.  He laughs a little.  When he glances up, Bond has tipped his head like a dog listening to someone in another room.

He’s a spy, too; Bond can read between the lines.  Bond licks his lips and turns to find the cup of water that’s been placed nearby.  It almost isn’t awkward when Q treads the miles between them to lift the straw to his mouth.  Bond drinks gratefully, in gulps that Q’s sure would set a frown between Medic Pitt’s eyebrows.  When he can speak: “We need to talk.”

“I need a cigarette.”  He’s fleeing, terrified, and Bond looks so, so patient as Q carefully replaces the cup, takes two steps backward, turns in place with his hands in his hair.  The gauze of his own bandages catches on the curls; he’d forgot he was injured, and the sharp little spikes of pain are grounding.  He draws his hands down again, touches his pocket where the little cardboard packet hides, goes for his lighter—

“Might do it in the stairs?” Bond suggests.  Mercy.  Q nods.

The stairs are blissfully cold against the small of his back.  Almost cold enough he wants his jacket, certainly cold enough that Q can feel his thoughts beginning to crystallize into solid shapes again.  He’s halfway through his cigarette when he hears Kevin’s familiar, exasperated sigh.  

“Oop,” Q says, the apology lost in the cloud of smoke that wreaths him when he opens his mouth.  He goes to put it out and Kevin smacks his arm.

“Budge over and give us one,” he says instead, sinking onto the concrete like it’s softer than the chair at his desk.  Q glances aside at him.  “‘S been a bloody long cock of a day,” Kevin complains.  The paper filter sticks to his lips as he puffs, crackling just the least bit.  Q cracks the obligatory dirty grin at the innuendo.

“It has.  Feels like three days stacked on top of one another.”

Kevin hums, and they smoke in silence.  Q finishes his first, given his head start, and reaches for another before Kevin smacks his arm again.  “Cheeky.  Don’t press your luck,” he says, offering his own half-finished instead.  They polish it off together, cold concrete ridges pressing into Q’s spine as he stares up the dizzying spiral of stairs above them.  The smoke’s escaped, fleeting and toxic.  Then: “Bond, eh?”  There isn’t an answer for it.  Q nods, just a little.

“Yeah.”

“He could do worse,” Kevin decrees.

“Glad to hear you think so,” Q tells him wryly, and Kevin grins.  “Will he be your guest for long?”

“Until he pulls his IV line and walks,” Kevin agrees.  “Hopefully he lets those broken ribs heal before he does it, but I don’t presume he’ll be there when you get back.”

Q gawps.  Bond looked—

“—like he barely scraped through this one,” Kevin agrees with Q’s expression.  “I mean, it’s not as bad as it seems at first glance, but it’s plenty bad.  Just the right mix for him to go home, self-medicate on liquid depressants, and not wake up for Christmas presents.”  He blinks, shrugs.  “Maybe you’d be a reason not to?”

“I think you vastly overestimate my importance to him.”  Q isn’t bitter.  He isn’t.  And he isn’t sad, either—and denial, et. al, he thinks to himself.  He feels his lips pucker alum-pursed around the thought.  Kevin shrugs.

When he gets back to the room, Bond is moody, brow furrowed as Medic Pitt checks his charts and vitals.  He even tips his nose up, marmishly scenting the tobacco on the air between them.  Medic Pitt wanders off to his other patients and Q—Q stays.

“You’re corrupting the Good Doctor,” Bond scolds, because they’ve split a cigarette or two before and Kevin gives off such consistently—if misleading, from Q’s experience—wholesome vibes.

“Working up my courage,” Q tells him.  He tells himself it’s better they get this conversation out of the way, that he rips this plaster off before the scab has time to realise it’s gone.  “I—”

“I don’t,” Bond starts, then glances almost as though he’s forgotten at Q’s hand.  “You’re hurt.”

“That is the most patently ridiculous observation I’ve ever heard you make.”  There’s nerves warring in Q’s stomach, making him catty and sarky and sour.  He bites his lip.  “It’s my own fault.  I did it to myself—I mean, it was an accident, but I did.  I crushed my computer mouse in my palm like the Incredible Hulk.”

Bond looks warily impressed.  “You’ll be out for the time it heals, then?”

“Don’t be daft.”

Bond’s grin at that is fleeting.  “And Pitt—?”

“—would prefer I were, but honestly, it’s not that deep, and it’s not my legs were hurt by it.  I can run.”  Bond’s grin grows wider.  “And you?” Q asks, though it’s not as if he won’t be getting the action report.  Bond tips his head again.

“Same as it ever was: car bomb.  Hair trigger a touch too sensitive—exploded before we had a chance to get inside.  Hameeda was on the inside of the sidewalk, so I was able to shove her aside.  We landed on the stairs.  Could have been softer,” Bond says ruefully.  “They think I’ve got a concussion, but I can tell it’s just a few ribs, maybe some spraining.  I’ll be right as rain here in a few days.  Home for Christmas.”

“The fuck you will!”  It escapes before Q has a chance to chase it back inside as it dashes after his imagination and Kevin’s vivid description earlier.  Bond’s brows shoot up, startled, and Q is trembling with such righteous fury his teeth nearly chatter.  “I haven’t made a damned fool of myself over you for you to kill yourself the week before Christmas!”

Bond’s surprise melts, thawing down his face until it’s puddled in soft lines around his mouth, in deep sketches beside his eyes.  He’d almost look like he were smiling, though Q knows that even Bond wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to grin at him in this mood.  Then:

“I thought of you.  When it went off.  When I was throwing Hameeda behind me and when I couldn’t hear anything but ringing bells for twenty minutes after.  I could have failed my mission, could have been permanently deaf, and all I could think was, ‘I never wanted him to see me die.’  It’s a hell of a time for a revelation, you know.  Long flight from Bahrain to London, even airlifted out in a helicopter.”

“Three hours or so, give or take,” Q says faintly.  “What are you saying?”  Because if he’s exaggerating, or if Q is misunderstanding, or if Bond is teasing—

“I know I made that decision so much longer ago.  Maybe I didn’t know it yet.  I do now.”

It’s.  Q feels his knees go soft this time.

::

It’s barely a limp, but it’s enough that Q feels guilty leaving Bond in his flat to be terrorized by his cats.  There isn’t much point to a party if you’re not allowed to drink, though, at least according to Bond, so Q’s being sent with his gift for the Secret Santa and strict orders not to return before his carriage has turned back to a pumpkin.  He settles their gifts under Eve’s tabletop tree with the others and spends the night coyly covering his face at all of the good-natured jokes aimed in his direction about Bond’s disappearance—the prevailing rumour is that Q’s wild bedroom behaviour had exhausted even the indefatigable Mr. Bond and he’s had to take the night to recover.  At some point someone hands him his own gift and another for Bond; he turns over theirs when it’s his turn, and before he quite knows it, he finds himself on a fire escape, cigarette burning between his fingers more incense than anything else.

“Budge over, then.”  It’s Kevin, of course.  Q grins, offering the half-burned stick and its tower of ash.  Kevin curls his lip in a sneer.

“Sorry for the mug,” Q says.  Overhead, he can pick Orion out by his belt, and he traces the shape with a curl of smoke.  “Left it too late and then didn’t have the brainpower to come up with a proper gift.”

Kevin’s laugh is bright.  “Are you joking?  You’re the best gift-giver ever; I’ve never needed a cig so bad, and you made Double-oh Seven behave for the entire duration of his stay—he even stayed the whole time!  You ought to be canonized Saint Christmas.”

Q laughs, too.

**Author's Note:**

> For the MI6 Cafe Secret Santa 2017 event! I had quite a lot of fun writing this and can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!


End file.
